Thomas Perry - The Face-Changers

Jane spent a few minutes watching the car from the hallway before she slipped into it and drove toward the freeway entrance. Now that she was in the city where the face-changers expected the woman to come, she felt the need to take every precaution. She knew the Los Angeles freeway system well, because she had used it other times with other runners. She put traffic jams between her and cars that might be following, and twice used ramps to slip off one freeway and onto another going in a different direction before she emerged near the address.

First she drove a circuit of the neighborhood, looking at other apartment buildings and single-family houses. There were no windows that had opaque shades with the rollers set too low so someone could look out above them, no flashes in the bright sunshine that could be lens reflections, no men loitering on balconies in the middle of a workday. She drove around again, studying the vehicles parked nearby, paying particular attention to vans and four-wheel-drive vehicles parked along the streets. There were none with men sitting behind the wheel, none that pulled out when they saw her approach for the second time.

Jane parked on the street near Janet McNamara’s apartment building, took out her suitcase, and walked into the little lobby that passed through the building and looked out on a small, desolate swimming pool. She avoided the elevator and walked down the hallway and up the stairs, listening for the thuds of feet, the sounds of a television set, for anything that would tell her who lived here and where they were at the moment, but she heard nothing.

When she found apartment 208, she stopped and studied the floor to see if there was any indication of wires under the thin industrial carpet, then cautiously inserted the key in the lock and opened it. A tiny piece of red fluff, like lint from a sweater, was released by the door near the hinge and drifted to the floor in the hallway. Jane smiled. It was an ancient trick for determining whether anyone had been here without going inside to check. If the fluff was there, then there was nobody inside waiting for her.

Jane slipped inside, locked the door, and looked around her. The apartment was small and simple, but the face-changers had furnished it in advance to keep Janet McNamara from making mistakes while she did it herself. Jane went into the bedroom, looked in the kitchen drawers and cupboards, the refrigerator. They had even bought her enough food so she wouldn’t have to go out until she had been here for a week.

Jane searched for the best hiding places. She moved a chair from the kitchen into the living room and stood on it to unscrew the grate from the heating duct high on the wall across from the entrance door. Then she took one of her video cameras out of the suitcase, set the lens to manual and focused on a space near the doorway, used a piece of tape to cover the red light that showed when it was on, pushed it two feet back into the heating duct, and replaced the grate.

On her way out she replaced the bit of red fluff, then went down the stairs to the street. The building next door had an apartment for rent, but when she had roused the manager and gotten him to open it for her, she found that the windows afforded her no view of Janet McNamara’s apartment. She would have to do this the hard way. She watched the neighborhood for two more hours, then drove back to the motel.

When Jane walked in, Janet McNamara was on the bed watching television. She turned it off as though she were hiding something. Jane turned it back on. “No need to turn it off for me.” There were two men in suits chatting about futures and options across an oddly shaped marble table. In a second or two the men were replaced by a table of figures.

Janet McNamara gave a comic wince. “They told me to start weaning myself away from the market stats, so I won’t be tempted to invest.”

Jane sighed. “They’re right about investing. I know very little about you, but if I were looking for you, that’s one of the ways I’d go about looking. I’d buy all the mailing lists of investors I could.”

“I know,” said Janet.

“On the other hand, somebody should have told you that you can’t expect to last very long if you go against all your preferences.”

“I don’t remember hearing that.”

“Watch the channel you like. Please yourself in quiet ways. While your enemies are standing around watching airline terminals and hotels at all hours, you want to be curled up in a cozy place feeling content. You’ll last forever, and they’ll give up.”

“I like that,” said Janet. “Of course, in my case it doesn’t have to be forever.”

Jane glanced at her without letting her see. She still didn’t get it. The face-changers had convinced her that she just had to slip away for a while to outlast some imaginary death threats, and had gotten her to do things that would make it too hard to ever go back. “Maybe not,” she murmured, and hated herself for it. She hated herself more for what she was about to say. “The apartment is fine. In the morning I’ll check once more, and then move you into your new home.”

27

Jane entered the building alone. She made her way to Janet McNamara’s hallway and up to her door, then opened it and watched the piece of red fluff fall to the floor. This time she let it stay there. She used the kitchen chair to climb to the vent in the living room, then removed the grate, retrieved the video camera from behind it, and played the tape back on fast forward, staring into the eyepiece. The tape was a still, unchanging shot of the closed door. She slipped the camera into her bag and went out to get the woman who was not Janet McNamara.

Jane brought her inside and closed the door. While Janet walked around the little apartment looking dazed, Jane told her, “I’m positive nobody has been here since I came in yesterday, and nobody seems to be watching from a building or a car around here. That’s the best I can do.”

“It’s … cozy, isn’t it?”

“What?”

“It’s kind of small and tacky. The apartment.”

Jane brought herself back to the business of resettling. She had seen this before in runners of her own who were used to having money. It was probably made worse for Janet McNamara because she had spent her life in old eastern cities with big, heavily ornamented buildings. Los Angeles was alien to her. Jane stepped back into her role. “It’s small and cheap because it gives you a low profile. These apartment buildings are full of young women from somewhere else who work as receptionists or secretaries or shop clerks. They don’t make a lot of money, and they spend most of it on clothes and car payments and going out. What you want to do is make yourself look so much like them that a stranger would need a microscope to pick you out of the crowd.”

“I guess that makes sense,” said Janet. Her voice was not enthusiastic. “Am I on my own now?”

Jane had not yet decided how to bring up the next issue, and this seemed like an opportunity. “Not yet. There will be a person who comes to be sure you’re settled. He probably won’t know why you didn’t take the plane. Don’t tell him.”

Janet’s head spun to look at her. “Why not?”

Jane had hoped this woman would be exhausted and preoccupied enough to lose her curiosity, but she had not. Jane waved a hand in a vague gesture. “Another standard procedure that protects everybody. We try to compartmentalize everything. But there’s always one of us who wants to know what everyone else is doing. It’s pretty hard to pry information out of a person who keeps secrets for a living, so people ask the client.”

Janet’s expression seemed to move through suspicion into certainty. She raised an eyebrow. “That’s what you’ve been doing to me, isn’t it? You’ve been asking me all these questions, and the reason you didn’t know the answers already was that you weren’t supposed to.”